7 ms·

What if the cost of investigating, prosecuting and sentencing is 100x more than what the bike is worth (very conservative guess)?

by Paul_S 12y ago

lmm 12y ago
Then the deterrence might still be worth more than that?
RyanMcGreal 12y ago
What if the benefit of chasing down a few bike thefts is that a huge number of potential thefts is deterred?
IkmoIkmo 12y ago
$1k bikes are naturally pretty common targets for theft (as it's pretty easy to break a $100 lock. More expensive bikes generally doesn't mean better security, but it often means more demand to steal it). At that price, I really wouldn't consider 100k to investigate, prosecute and sentence a very conservative guess. Seems a bit on the high end. Stealing a bike doesn't result in jail generally (expensive). The prosecution is usually quick and easy (tons of similar cases) and the penalty is usually a fine for first-time offenders. What you also often see in crime is the 80/20 effect. For example here in Amsterdam they created a list of 500 people who often ran into trouble with the police and focused a lot of effort on them. As each and every one of them plans and executes on an elaborate theft say once a month, they're responsible for more than 10 of such cases every single day. The other thousands of people who commit a theft might do it incidentally, like once every few years or once in their life, and usually not something elaborate. Same with bike theft, I think. I've actually seen big vans with a team of 3 operate at night. They'll throw 15 bikes that are locked but not attached into the van in the span of 5 minutes with the 3 of em, then drive off to some garage and spend the next 5 hours relaxed cutting through the locks in comfort with the right tools. They'll switch neighborhoods every now and then, and sell 20 at a time to struggling obscure bike shops that need a bigger profit than what they can get if they buy straight from the factory. If you have 2-3 of such teams operate in your city and do two weekly runs that's easily a million bucks, that's, you can probably get rid of them for a few hundred thousand bucks and recuperate 100k from the thieves. But you prevent a million in theft and restore a bit of social order. Of course it's not just the theft, it's also the broken-window theory stuff. The notion of escalating crime, and of affluent people moving to other places if you let this + 50 other things like this slip, and you end up with dropping rents and an imbalance of disproportionate amounts of low-socioeconomic individuals living there. Bit of a slippery slope argument I know but it's not far from the truth.
mathattack 12y ago
This is the broken window theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory The (somewhat controversial) idea is that if you go out of your way to punish smaller crimes, people don't do the bigger ones. It wasn't cost effective for police in NYC to stop the smaller crimes (people spraying water on your windshield and asking for a dollar to wipe it off) but larger crimes dropped with it. If you view police as a fixed cost, then perhaps it is worthwhile. That said, there are plenty of holes in the theory. Gary Becker writes a lot about the economics of crime too. http://chicagomaroon.com/2012/05/25/the-economics-of-crime-with-gary-becker/ http://chicagomaroon.com/2012/05/25/the-economics-of-crime-w...

What if the cost of investigating, prosecuting and sentencing is 100x more than what the bike is worth (very conservative guess)?

by Paul_S 12y ago

What if the cost of investigating, prosecuting and sentencing is 100x more than what the bike is worth (very conservative guess)?

lmm 12y ago

Then the deterrence might still be worth more than that?

RyanMcGreal 12y ago

What if the benefit of chasing down a few bike thefts is that a huge number of potential thefts is deterred?

IkmoIkmo 12y ago

$1k bikes are naturally pretty common targets for theft (as it's pretty easy to break a $100 lock. More expensive bikes generally doesn't mean better security, but it often means more demand to steal it). At that price, I really wouldn't consider 100k to investigate, prosecute and sentence a very conservative guess. Seems a bit on the high end. Stealing a bike doesn't result in jail generally (expensive). The prosecution is usually quick and easy (tons of similar cases) and the penalty is usually a fine for first-time offenders. What you also often see in crime is the 80/20 effect. For example here in Amsterdam they created a list of 500 people who often ran into trouble with the police and focused a lot of effort on them. As each and every one of them plans and executes on an elaborate theft say once a month, they're responsible for more than 10 of such cases every single day. The other thousands of people who commit a theft might do it incidentally, like once every few years or once in their life, and usually not something elaborate. Same with bike theft, I think. I've actually seen big vans with a team of 3 operate at night. They'll throw 15 bikes that are locked but not attached into the van in the span of 5 minutes with the 3 of em, then drive off to some garage and spend the next 5 hours relaxed cutting through the locks in comfort with the right tools. They'll switch neighborhoods every now and then, and sell 20 at a time to struggling obscure bike shops that need a bigger profit than what they can get if they buy straight from the factory. If you have 2-3 of such teams operate in your city and do two weekly runs that's easily a million bucks, that's, you can probably get rid of them for a few hundred thousand bucks and recuperate 100k from the thieves. But you prevent a million in theft and restore a bit of social order. Of course it's not just the theft, it's also the broken-window theory stuff. The notion of escalating crime, and of affluent people moving to other places if you let this + 50 other things like this slip, and you end up with dropping rents and an imbalance of disproportionate amounts of low-socioeconomic individuals living there. Bit of a slippery slope argument I know but it's not far from the truth.

mathattack 12y ago

This is the broken window theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory The (somewhat controversial) idea is that if you go out of your way to punish smaller crimes, people don't do the bigger ones. It wasn't cost effective for police in NYC to stop the smaller crimes (people spraying water on your windshield and asking for a dollar to wipe it off) but larger crimes dropped with it. If you view police as a fixed cost, then perhaps it is worthwhile. That said, there are plenty of holes in the theory. Gary Becker writes a lot about the economics of crime too. http://chicagomaroon.com/2012/05/25/the-economics-of-crime-with-gary-becker/ http://chicagomaroon.com/2012/05/25/the-economics-of-crime-w...